By Zhuoqiao Hong, Haocheng Wang, Zaid Zada, Harshvardhan Gazula, David Turner, Bobbi Abrey, Leonard Niekerken, Werner Doyle, Sasha Devore, Patricia Dugan, Daniel Friedman, Orin Devinsky, Adeen Flinker, Uri Hasson, Samuel A. Nastase, Ariel Goldstein

Recent research has used large language models (LLMs) to study the neural basis of naturalistic language processing in the human brain. LLMs have rapidly grown in complexity, leading to improved language processing capabilities. However, neuroscience researchers haven’t kept up with the quick progress in LLM development. Here, we utilized several families of transformer-based LLMs to investigate the relationship between model size and their ability to capture linguistic information in the human brain. Crucially, a subset of LLMs were trained on a fixed training set, enabling us to dissociate model size from architecture and training set size. We used electrocorticography (ECoG) to measure neural activity in epilepsy patients while they listened to a 30-minute naturalistic audio story. We fit electrode wise encoding models using contextual embeddings extracted from each hidden layer of the LLMs to predict word-level neural signals. In line with prior work, we found that larger LLMs better capture the structure of natural language and better predict neural activity. We also found a log-linear relationship where the encoding performance peaks in relatively earlier layers as model size increases. We also observed variations in the best-performing layer across different brain regions, corresponding to an organized language processing hierarchy.

Read the paper: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.101204.1